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Cover Quote: July 1998

The Year 2000 problem is an example on a vast scale of knowledge disappearing into code. And the soon-to-fail national air-traffic-control system is but one stark instance of how computerized expertise can be lost. In March, the New York Times reported that IBM had told the Federal Aviation Administration that, come the millennium, the existing system will stop functioning reliably. IBM’s advice was to completely replace the system, because, they said, there was “no one left who understands the inner workings of the host computer.”

No one left who understands. Air-traffic-control systems, bookkeeping, drafting, circuit design, spelling, differential equations, assembly lines, ordering systems, network-object communications, rocket launchers, atom-bomb silos, electric generators, operating systems, fuel injectors, CT scans, air conditioners—an exploding list of subjects, objects, and processes rushing into code, which eventually will be left running without anyone left who understands them. A world full of things like mainframe computers, which we can use or throw away, with little choice in between. A world floating atop a sea of programs we’ve come to rely on but no longer truly understand or control. Code and forget; code and forget; programming as a collective exercise in incremental forgetting.



- Ellen Ullman
The Dumbing-Down of Programming, 1998
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